Boppin

"LET'S GET BOPPIN'!!!!!! YEAAAAHHHHH!!!!!"

Boppin' is a Puzzle Game made in 1994 by a company named Accursed Toys, which consisted of a few people, including Jennifer Diane Reitz of Unicorn Jelly fame. It was originally released for Amiga, but sold very poorly: a DOS version was later made, featuring more overall levels, a slightly different plot, a better color palette (as opposed to the 32 colors of the Amiga version) and some enhancements.

The story: Boik and Yeet are two videogame heroes from the dimension of Arcapaedia. They soon learn that every villain in their favourite games are disappearing, and are confronted by a number of former game heroes, worried that, without any enemy to fight, they will become useless. Boik and Yeet discover that every enemy character was kidnapped and trapped by Sweety Hunnibunz, a creature who wants everything to become clean and wholesome by removing every trace of "bad things", beginning with games. Boik and Yeet then must fight him and, in later episodes, his unnamed wife and Oops, their son.

'The gameplay: Boppin is divided into single-screen levels full of destroyable blocks and bonuses. There are spots on the ground where blocks spontaneously form (usually where Boik or Yeet appear): the heroes must pick them up and throw them to the other blocks to match them and make them disappear. Boik and Yeet can only shoot them with an angle of 45°, so the player should pay attention to the rebounds of blocks against walls and floors: if a block collides with another block that doesn't match, or against a lethal floor (undistinguishable from the normal tiles), or if it goes off the screen, Boik or Yeet will lose a life. There are also refractor tiles, that send the blocks bouncing against them flying in one of the four cardinal directions.

The blocks disappear if two or more of them are matched, but if the player completes a pattern of blocks (usually cross- or square-shaped), one of the creatures captured by Hunnibunz will be freed, granting the player many additional points.

The game can be found as freeware here, with full Win XP compatibility, and with the original Amiga sounds and music added.

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The game provides examples of:

• Alliterative Name - Pete Pixelhead and Victor Vector, that are also references to videogame graphics.
• And the Adventure Continues...
• Art Shift - There are lots of different tilesets for the various elements of the game, therefore many levels have unique graphics that look like, for example, scribbles on paper, blueprints or fake old-style vector graphics; some of them emulate the looks of other games (see Shout-Out below).
• Balance Between Good and Evil: "Without darkness there can be no light!"
• Catch Phrase - "Great gooey goddesses!" (Boik & Yeet), "I am FREE!" (videogame villains set free).
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe - Boik, Yeet and all of the other characters are all inhabitants of intersecating multiverses created and brought to life by people's imaginations (there are television universes, dream universes and so on). Specifically, Arcapaedia is the product of alien fantasies about alien arcade games.
• Color-Coded Multiplayer - It helps that Yeet and Boik have animations specific to themselves.
• Cool Shades - Boik & Yeet wear these.
• Crush! Kill! Destroy! - Oops Hunnibunz utters almost exactly this string of words.
• Driven to Suicide - Boik commits Seppuku after losing all of his lives. Yeet puts a gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger...
• Easter Egg - there is a button in the help of the level editor named "filler" that when pressed shows some quotes from the game developers and some other more or less nonsensical tidbits and facts.
• Embarrassing First Name - For some reason, Hunnibunz' son is named "Oops". Yeah, that really is his name.
  • Maybe this means that his parents didn't want him to be born...
• Evil Laugh - Every time one of the monsters is set free.
• Executive Meddling - The blood in the Vanity Plate and the suicide sequences were removed from an early DOS release, and subsequently re-introduced with the possibility to turn the censorship on and off.
• Knight Templar - Hunnibunz.
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo - Among the heroes that seek fot Boik and Yeet's help there are: Pockman, Blub and Blob, Gynandria the elf, Pete Pixelhead, and Jerome the Galactic Hero (a tough guy that looks a bit like Turrican).
• Level Editor - One of the most interesting features. The fifth episode of the licensed version actually is just a way to play levels created with the editor.
• Nonstandard Game Over: Losing to Hunnibunz prompts a different, longer Game Over that isn't as bad as losing beforehand.
• Match Two Game
• Moral Guardians - Parodied with the Hunnibunz.
• Political Correctness Gone Mad - The Hunnibunz family. Oops quite literally went mad after witnessing his parents' defeat at the hands of Boik and Yeet.
• The Multiverse - It was developed by Jennifer Diane Reitz, so it's a given.
• The Nineties - Some references that date the game to this period, such as one of the heroes using a virtual reality device in one of the intros.
• Scoring Points - Used interestingly. Not only does a high score get your name in the high score list, it also increases the damage your thrown weapons do to the boss at the end of each episode and determines the ending you get.
• Shout-Out - Some levels are made to resemble graphics from other videogames, since the plot of the game involves freeing videogame villains. There are levels based on Pac-Man, Marble Madness, Arkanoid, Q*Bert and even Ultima. Among the monsters there are enemies from Dig Dug and Bubble Bobble, the bonus prizes include items from Rainbow Islands and background graphics include things like Daleks, Hello Kitty characters and so on.
• Trial and Error Gameplay - Invoked by the fact that it is possible to save and load games, and restart infinite times any given level, without any penalty than having the number of points and lives reset to what you had when you first entered it.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change - The boss fight at the end of each episode. Instead of solving puzzles, you throw weapons at the boss enemy while it bounces around the room trying to crush you.